1. The Labor Department plans to track "women's work," which includes unpaid household labor like child care and home repairs.
2. Economists from Bard College suggested a way to measure this activity, termed "household production."
3. Women accounted for 78% of unpaid household production in 2019, reflecting societal gender norms.
4. Tracking this data is crucial for understanding the true cost of living, pay gap explanations, and women's labor participation rates.
5. The measure could enhance poverty measures and was prompted by the pandemic highlighting the importance of unpaid labor.
6. Feminist economists have long pushed for recognizing unpaid work as an economic issue.
7. The Bard economists used data from various sources to measure household production by converting task hours into a measurable value.
8. The Labor Department plans to review the methodology and potentially add a household production measure to its expenditure data in 2025.